When I wrote Learning and Failure I struggled with the word failure. Setbacks and obstacles that some see as failures can often become the impetus for far greater learning than if the roadblock never needed to be faced.

Here is the end of the post:

“The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.”

One of our students at Inquiry Hub is working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can listen to a song and determine the key of that song. The workings of this are far beyond my understanding, but in his reflection about his learning so far, (after doing a great job explaining the process), he shared this in his ‘Log of Milestones’:

– Made a python script to automatically take a mp3 file, and find its music key by making a query to Tunebat. I got blocked by Tunebat, because they identified my automated queries as an “attack” on their server.

– Wrote a Firefox web extension using javascript to make the queries to Tunebat not seem automated, and therefore not rejected. Managed to work.

And then later:

– I found there was a way on Python to fake a web request to Tunebat without getting blocked.

I love seeing this creativity and resiliency. The obstacle becomes the way. He sends hundreds of automated requests to a website, essential to give him the large amounts of data he needs to train his AI; the website sees these automated requests as an attack on their server (this is known as a DOS attack); So he writes first a web browser extension, then later a python program, that tricks the website into answering his thousands of requests without seeing them as an attack.

The roadblock or failure isn’t a failure, it’s an opportunity to adapt, be creative, and learn new skills.

F ailure

A lways

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The invitation is always there, the opportunity to overcome can become the place where amazing learning happens. A potential failure can become the impetus to build resilience and to create new and unforeseen challenges to overcome. It can become the thing that makes the learning experience a worthy experience to remember… more memorable than the easy ‘A’ on a cookie-cutter style learning experience where the outcome is uniform for all the students who jump through the same hoops to get that ‘A’.

The obstacle can be the failure point where people give up, or it can be the opportunity to overcome. The learning invitation is there, as long as the drive, resilience, and effort are there to push a student.

Sure in this example he might not have been able to fool the website, and maybe his efforts could have come up short, but I don’t think that would have stopped him anyway. His attempts at a workaround could still have provided a lot of learning that he never would have had otherwise. The obstacle became the way, and while the positive outcome this time was rewarding, so too could have been a so-called ‘failure’. There is nothing artificial about this kind of learning.